Hosiery for many years has been knitted as a string of continuous tubular fabric on Komet machines manufactured by Scott & Williams, Incorporated, New York, N.Y. These machines have become standard in the industry for knitting a wide range of hosiery for men, women and children. The individual articles of hose are connected by a ring of alginate or PVA (polyvinyl acetate) yarn which provides a breakaway connection between the hose.
To further process the hosiery, a "knitter" must periodically remove the string of hose from the storage cannister on the machine. The "knitter" then separates the hose by tearing the alignate yarn ring. This operation presents the individual hose in an inverted condition. In some installations it is desirable to first turn the hose before separating. This can be done by hand, but it will be appreciated that manual separation and handling of hosiery is a wasteful and uneconomical process. Various attempts over the years have been made to provide greater efficiency for handling the hose coming from the Komet knitting machine. A typical "on machine" operation that has been accomplished is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,116,021, entitled Hosiery Handling Apparatus and Method, and assigned to the assignee of the present invention. This machinery provides a combined process. Each in line hose is inverted into a vertically suspended tube and then jerked away from the string, thereby breaking the alginate ring.
Still another approach has been a "tensionless" separating apparatus as described in U.S. Pat No. 4,250,723 entitled Apparatus for Separating Hosiery and also assigned to the assignee of the present invention. The gripping and separating arm and a clamping arm include a pair of jaws attached to the ends thereof for releasably engaging the knitted tubular fabric as it comes from the knitting head of the machine. The gripping jaws and the clamping jaws intermittently engage the tubular fabric adjacent the weakened portion of the articles and the gripping arm exerts an upward pulling force moving away from the clamping arm to cause the articles to be separated along the weakened portions.
Associated with the handling and separation of the tubular fabric is the stopping of the knitting machine in the event of a malfunction. Heretofore this has been accomplished by complicated mechanisms which are actuated by the traveling hose articles to trip a circuit stopping the machine as described, for example, by U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,625,026 and 3,323,334. These devices are not satisfactory from the standpoint of reliability and simplicity of design.